The anonymity trend & self-presentation fatigue

If you follow either tech news or kids’ digital media preferences, you’ve probably noticed the anonymity trend – including Whisper, Secret, Yik Yak and many others. Anonymity has raised plenty of concerns but it’s likely not going away. It’s part of the connectivity landscape now. Why do I say that? Because it seems to be a solution to and welcome relief from the last source of major consternation: self-presentation in social media and the whole spectrum of concerns surrounding it – e.g., that what’s posted online stays forever and is searchable, that users need to worry about reputations for academic and professional prospects, and even that our children are an unprecedentedly “narcissistic generation” (see this about that last one).

No wonder we’re seeing self-presentation fatigue! People get tired of worrying about how they’re presenting themselves, tired of other people worrying about how they present themselves, tired of other people‘s self-presentation and tired of everybody worrying out loud about potential harm from self-presentation. [See what I mean? Aren’t you even tired of this list of types of self-presentation fatigue?]

It’s like coming down off the stage and melting into the crowd or relaxing into a circle of friends after a hard week at school or work. You feel like…

• Anonymous or disappearing posts can’t be associated with you far into the future by worry warts, judgmental people, bosses, recruiters or prospective employers
• You can compliment someone anonymously when it might seem weird or be a little embarrassing to do so openly (see “But there’s a flipside” in this conversation about online anonymity among student leaders), or…
• You can confess to a secret crush – almost like in the days of paper diaries kept under lock and key, except shared with the crush (secretly by you rather than your best friend).
• Even on a bad hair day or when you’re out of sorts, to brighten things up, you can share a photo or video showing a funny face or just get silly with friends. 

And so on. It’s the lighter side of social media. I’m not saying these things are necessarily true in all cases, but that’s the feeling that people have about anonymity, a bit of hopeful relief – and release.

It can be exhausting to be under the spotlight, and anonymity allows people to be themselves without instant judgment from people they don’t know – or scrutiny way off in the future because of the fairly permanent, searchable archive that is the Internet. It allows for spontaneity.

Anonymity not guaranteed

But it’s not guaranteed. Most Snapchat users know this, I suspect, but it’s good to be sure they do: Anonymity can go away, when screenshots are taken and shared without the photographer’s knowledge, mistakenly or intentionally, and/or when someone violates terms of service and gets abusive. Young users need to know that the offending sharer can be traced and face repercussions. Schools can get court orders that get sites and apps to identify abusers. Apps and other services that allow abuse can eventually be seen as bad actors or social cesspools and at least stay small or eventually go away, as JuicyCampus did (Wikipedia has the history).

There is no question that online anonymity has a dark side too, so we all need to be very intentional about creating social norms that reject social cruelty and social media services that allow it – and helping our children develop those norms. As users we are all stakeholders in supporting respectful use and marginalizing abuse.

Anonymity not new

But it’s not like anonymous posting and secret confessions arrived on the planet with apps, as Prof. Sameer Hinduja points out in a recent blog post. He talks about how users have been using Facebook pages, which allow their creators to be anonymous, to display secret confessions (linking to a Reuters report over a year ago. Visitors can “send private messages to the page with specific confessions, and the administrator of the page then posts them publicly to the Wall for all ‘followers’ to see. Another way to keep posts anonymous is to create an email account specifically to receive confessions from others, or set up a form via free online tools such as Google Docs (or SurveyMonkey, or even an Ask.fm page). Then, [users] can clink on a link, open up the form, share their confession without giving any identifying information, and click ‘send.’ The person behind it all then receives these anonymous confessions via email, and then can post them for all to see.”

It’s important to be as open to the light as to the dark side of online anonymity, if only for the sake of better, more candid conversations with our children. It’s rarely all darkside, so if we don’t buy into all the fears and dire predictions, we just more credible when we have legitimate concerns. So it’s good to be informed. To that end, I highly recommend Dr. Hinduja’s blog post.

Related links

• Research on anonymity (posted last August) and an August 2012 post on “How anonymity’s a safety factor: 1 clear example”
• “Balancing external with internal Internet safety tools”
• “Whisper’s popularity no longer a secret”
• “Will safety ever be ‘baked in’ to social apps?”
• “The app ecosystem & very public secrets”
• About Snapchat and a university student’s view of the humanizing effect of escaping the self-presentation trap through ephemeral sharing
• “How Yik Yak is different from other social media” and an update on how it geo-fenced off schools